The personal blog of Reyn Bowman, a Durham NC resident, 40-year veteran of community-destination marketing and still an explorer in community sense-of-place. Opinions expressed here are those of the author.

I hear good things on the street but as a polling expert on NPR heeded the news media this week, “an anecdote isn’t data nor is it a trend.” I’ve heard the results of two recent and well conducted polls about the Durham street bond.

One, using only respondents who fit traditional voting patterns, shows the measure passing and I believe it will. But the turnout in the 2008 election was unusual and from news reports, it appears the upcoming election could also be unusual but for different reasons. Another poll using all respondents who “say” they are likely to vote in this election shows passage of the street bond could all come down to who actually votes this year.

Ordinarily you can trust the traditional approach which doesn’t ask you if you’re going to vote but assumes you that you will by the nature of your demographics and past voting patterns. This is especially true in a community like Durham where turnout traditionally tends to consist of a somewhat small but passionate lot of pro-Durham voters.

However, the 2008 election was anything but traditional in Durham and judging by other polls around the country it appears this one may not be traditional either, but for opposite reasons. One election used optimism to pull many more voters into the process and this time it appears negativity may well pull more “anti” voters into the process.

Just click to enlarge the humorous image above to see the disconnect many voters obviously have between taxes paid and benefits received (shared recently by Rob Gillespie on Facebook.) Apparently, to the people depicted it won’t matter that the Durham bond will only cost each taxpayer about the same as a cup of coffee each month.

I still recall mid-90s when this happened and we’re still living with the consequences. They gerrymandered districts to eliminate some great statesmen, did stupid things to drive up the trade deficit and generated some peculiar opinions such as the one asked me at a public hearing by an elected official from the self-proclaimed, pro-business party: When will Durham have enough visitors and no longer need promotion?

This question is humorous because a community theoretically may reach a point at when it doesn’t need more visitor revenue but to sustain that level, each visitor would still need to be re-drawn from scratch each year, so there is no guaranteed par when it comes to visitation.

Hopefully this election won’t take us back to those days…we need all of the optimistic and “can-do” thinking we can get out of this mess.

If you’re interested in public opinion polling as I am, a good blog that I enjoy which was recommended to me by some friends is FiveThirtyEight .

2 comments:

Hope you'll shed some light on some of those reasons Barry. I'd be very interested. I've only heard two, the tax issue and the head of Young Republicans noting it should come out of operating. I blogged that of course it should...Tom has acknowledged that going forward it will...right now we're catching up on deferred maintenance done in the '90s but that was also due to perceived resistance to taxes. I'd be interested in other reasons. Hope you're well and thanks for the comment.